"Meet the new boss - same as the old boss"

Until my mid-30s there was a clear ideological difference between the two main parties. At gut level, you knew what they stood for. With the Lib Dems it wasn't so clear — they seemed to me as some sort of fudge in between although, being in origin far older than socialism, that couldn't be quite right.

Thatcher's assault on the old working class — the dismantling (and eventual banishing overseas) of nationalised industries, the forced sale of council housing, the intimidation of trades unionists through fear of litigation or unemployment — roundly and permanently defeated the (old) Labour Party. In order to preserve something of its past glories New Labour had to abandon socialism, and left behind a large chunk of its membership.

What the 'first-past-the-post' system has delivered is three grey parties competing for a narrow middle ground that most of us know instinctively has had its day. The rise of Nick Clegg's LibDems is not exciting. It does not usher in anything particularly new. I have reached the point where I am not only bored by the BBCs election coverage but angered by it.

Only the parties on the fringe are addressing the real issues in people's minds. The BNP, UKIP and the Greens are not afraid to speak their mind on migration, and the gulf between the latter and the other two is almost total. People instinctively know that there is something horribly wrong with financial systems that have nearly bankrupted the country yet continue to pay eye-watering sums to those responsible for their failure. They know that capping bonuses will do nothing to address the fundamental sickness, even though they can't put their finger on what that sickness really is. Many fear that serious attempts to address our carbon-hungry lifestyle will be 'too little too late' for their grandchildren, and that electric cars and green technology on its own is an inadequate answer. Oxford probably has the highest-qualified wine waiters in the world — young people taught they have a 'right' to aspire to something 'better', but unable to access housing and the promised exciting jobs with prospects. The Cabinet Office's recent publication "Unleashing Aspiration" says we need to see how parents 'could be empowered with a new right to choose a better school for their children'. The absurdity of this statement is laughable. As Stefan Collini's excellent article in a recent issue of the London Review of Books says : 'If all parents have a right to choose a 'better' school, won't we have to maintain in each locality a number of ghostly 'worse' schools to which no children are actually sent, whose function is to show that some schools are 'better' than others?'

What is most galling is that the same parties that promote such 'aspiration' have actually delivered a society in which, of all the world's rich societies apart from the USA, parental levels of wealth are by far the single biggest determinant of a child's life chances in the UK. Indeed, it's the father's income that most determines the child's. And this is the conclusion of a January report from the government's own Equalities Office! If this is what New Labour delivered, can anyone seriously imagine the Conservatives or even Lib Dems delivering anything better? 'Fairness' is on all their lips, but only the Green Party talks robustly about equality.

'First past the post' has delivered a debt-ridden, politically disenfranchised electorate torn apart by inequality, where people with less chance of economic self-improvement than ever in living memory are given sermons on their duty to aspire to 'better'. A 'brave new world' for electoral politics emerging? I hardly think so. Which shade of black do you prefer? Until we can get the real questions addressed by politicians with some political courage it will only get worse — and 'first past the post' saps political courage. That is the reason, amongst a hundred others, why I'm throwing my weight behind the Green Party. The BNP and UKIP claim to be 'telling it like it is', except that they're 'telling it how it seems' to disenchanted, largely white, little-Englander Tories of working class and middle class (respectively) who think that human-induced global warming is a European plot. The Green Party alone actually 'tells it like it is' and knows how to begin tackling it.